white new england cheese

November 15, 2022 4:18 PM

For most of my life, I’ve considered the default color of both cheddar and American cheese to be yellow. I’ve always been aware of the existence of white cheddar and white American, but those have always seemed to be variations, like green tomatoes or blue corn tortillas. But not in New England. Why?

If I order a cheeseburger at a national chain, I expect, and pretty much always get, yellow cheese. Some places offer white cheese, but it’s always something you have to specifically request. But if I go to a local restaurant here in New Hampshire, or a New England-only chain, I almost always get served white cheese. A lot of these places don’t even offer yellow cheddar or yellow American as an option. Most of the time, white American is at least identified as such, indicating that they’re aware of the existence of yellow American, but white cheddar is usually just listed as cheddar. What’s the deal? I assume it’s just one of those regional quirks, like driving badly or insisting Tom Brady is better than Peyton Manning or not pronouncing the letter R. But is there a story behind it? I’ve had locally -made yellow cheddars here in NH and in Vermont, so I know people here know it exists.

posted by kevinbelt to Food & Drink (25 answers total)

It looks like cheesemakers in New England never added coloring to their cheddar to account for seasonal variations in natural color so historically people tend to prefer white cheddars as being local. Elsewhere cows ate more grass, got more beta carotene and the cheese itself ended up with a natural orange hue that was standardized with annatto.

More detail here.

Another fun regional thing is east coast vs west coast butter stick shapes.
posted by mikesch at 4:32 PM on November 15, 2022 [24 favorites]

Yeah, cheddar historically only was yellow/orange when dairy conditions were just right. That said, the annato used for coloring does impart a slight flavor, and some people may prefer (or dislike) that on its own, but it's very hard to fully separate taste from color.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:48 PM on November 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

New Englanders also believe that eggs are brown.
posted by bag of teeth at 5:35 PM on November 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

@bag of trash: That is because brown eggs are local eggs and local eggs are fresh!

(I still have aversion to white eggs to this day due to this jingle. White eggs are for Easter dying only.)
posted by chiefthe at 5:55 PM on November 15, 2022 [14 favorites]

Yellow cheddar is an abomination. Cheddar is waxy off-white. That’s why.

-a Vermonter
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 6:14 PM on November 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

Wait.

There's yellow cheddar?

Call the food safety guys!
posted by nothing.especially.clever at 7:14 PM on November 15, 2022

Moving to the Midwest 20 years ago, yellow cheddar was one of the culture shocks.
posted by hworth at 7:27 PM on November 15, 2022

I grew up in Michigan and we always had white cheddar, maybe not as often but it was still pretty common. But white American came as a shock. Something about the artificiality, the sweetness of it seems to require an unnatural yellow-orange tint to make it work.
posted by goatdog at 7:50 PM on November 15, 2022

Annatto seed, which is what's used to color cheddar, is delicious. It makes cheese taste better, if you ask me. I wish annatto seeds weren't so hard to find in grocery stores, I want to put them in everything. (Do not bother trying to blend or chop annatto seeds. Crush them with a mortar and pestle or buy it as a powder. It's the only way.)

Is it possible that white cheese was thought of as cheaper or lower quality, and new englanders weren't about to pay extra for value-added, and then it just became a thing? I'm not from New England but if you have a reputation for being scrappy like the land (I don't know if you do or not), maybe that could be it?
posted by aniola at 8:07 PM on November 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is marble (white and orange) cheddar a thing in the US? I wonder if effectively having had the Annatto seed cut by 50% is why I've always though it tasted different than the nominally identical orange variety.
posted by Mitheral at 8:33 PM on November 15, 2022

Nthing mikesch (excellent link!), and I highly recommend giving this podcast a listen as well for a deep dive into the history of cheddar. Their two-parter on butter (with a fascinating look into margarine in the Midwest in the 50s and 60s) also has overlap into this topic and regional dairy product quirks.
posted by OhHaieThere at 2:22 AM on November 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

This is interesting to me, because I've always wondered why Scottish cheddar is orange, as opposed to English cheddar, which is pale yellow. Googling that just now gave me this article which explains your New England variations pretty succinctly.

I can't find anything that specifically talks about why Scotland has gone all the way on the coloured cheddar spectrum, but it was presumably for similar reasons.
posted by penguin pie at 3:14 AM on November 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

OhHaieThere, that podcast looks amazing. Off to try it out!
posted by evilmomlady at 3:42 AM on November 16, 2022

Today I learned white is not the default color for cheddar or American cheese.
- a New Englander
posted by emd3737 at 3:50 AM on November 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

I live in Connecticut, and my local grocery store (ShopRite) stocks "Vermont white cheddar" and "New York yellow cheddar" among its store-brand varieties. To me, this speaks to Connecticut's liminal status within New England.
posted by Johnny Assay at 4:05 AM on November 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

There's a bit in one of the Little House books where Ma dyes the butter with carrot juice. (The food memories from that series are so firmly imprinted in my brain.) I seem to remember a similar thing in one of Ruth Goodman's videos, where she talks about summer vs winter butter or cheese or something.

In the Mid-Atlantic, store-brand/cheap cheddar is yellow, sometimes aggressively so, while the fancier varieties are off-white.
posted by basalganglia at 4:47 AM on November 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Growing up in southern Ontario, I always associated white cheddar with the slightly more luxe varieties. These days, the usual coding for widespread brands seems to be diminishing pigment with increasing sharpness. Medium = virulent orange, old = yellowish-orange, extra old = white.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:11 AM on November 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Went on Cabot's factory tour and they said they'd make some yellow cheddar for western state markets.
posted by sammyo at 5:38 AM on November 16, 2022

Cabot is my favorite cheddar, and (at least in NYC) they sell both Vermont Cheddar and New York Cheddar - but both kinds come in both white and yellow. That's just pandering, Cabot! ...and a way to take up more shelf space, I'm sure.
posted by moonmilk at 5:50 AM on November 16, 2022

Response by poster: Interesting to know about the color variations in the US, and to confirm that I'm not crazy in noticing New England is different. But why? Pretty much everywhere else has adopted annatto-colored cheddar, but NE hasn't. There's gotta be a story there besides "we just wanted to be different". I mean, everyone uses the stupid cowpath story to justify the poorly-planned road system. Someone has to have come up with something similar for cheese?

And also, I assume the white American is a result of the prevalance of white cheddar here, right? Everywhere else matches their American cheese to roughly the same shade as their cheddar, and so New England makes their American cheese white?

Today I learned white is not the default color for cheddar or American cheese.

Seriously? Have you never eaten at McDonalds? Subway? Bought a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese?
posted by kevinbelt at 9:40 AM on November 16, 2022

In the UK it used to be (80s ish) that cheddar was about 50:50; cheese counters would have both. Other cheeses might be consistently orange (Red Leicester) or white (Caerphilly, Wednesdale) because of the style, but cheddar was an odd special case. That seems to have died out and now white cheddar is the norm.

(Also, eggs are brown by default and it amuses me that people in the US have to pay more for brown eggs.)
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 11:07 AM on November 16, 2022

This NPR article goes a bit into the why and history of your question, albeit for all of one sentence. Why specifically, and what it is about New Englander culture (Puritanism? Yankee thrift ? Something else entirely?) that led to this disdain may be lost to history or at least I was unable to find ... YET.
posted by OhHaieThere at 11:21 AM on November 16, 2022

I’m sorry, but I just had a moment as a European-transplant to Massachusetts because I just realized, after almost 20 years, that cheddar came in colors other than white. So take that as a data point, I guess New England is truly that homogenous about its cheddar.
posted by lydhre at 12:42 PM on November 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

And about MacDonalds/Kraft… I just thought that was what fake cheese was supposed to look like.
posted by lydhre at 12:43 PM on November 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

For what it's worth "real" American cheese around Philadelphia is white, and also much better than the kraft-singles-like orange American abomination that the rest of the country uses. Very orange cheese is usually more industrial and cheap, unless you're at a cheese counter that doesn't really do that kind of thing. And then it's still probably the mid range Wisconsin cheddar or mimolette. I'm sure there are expensive orange cheeses I'm not thinking of, these are big generalizations only.
posted by sepviva at 7:34 PM on November 18, 2022